Lost in translation
By ohhhman - 10/04/2009 00:13 - United States
By ohhhman - 10/04/2009 00:13 - United States
By derbyboy - 19/10/2011 05:38 - United Kingdom
By fistpumpin4life - 10/10/2010 00:51 - France
By Anonymous - 17/02/2010 16:32 - Canada
By ... - 12/03/2009 18:57 - France
By Jim - 11/01/2012 01:32 - Belgium
By perfectlybrokenx - 24/08/2010 04:21 - Canada
By Aleksandar - 25/11/2020 05:01
By KMKWEEN - 16/02/2009 14:37 - United States
By Anonymous - 13/06/2024 07:00 - United States
By dads can’t cook? - 17/03/2021 21:30
You're a jerk. What's so bad about saying "Pardon? I didn't catch that." Nothing.
#30 You have probably not ever bothered to learn a second language then (and no, a few phrases you learned in high school Spanish doesn't count), it's harder than you think and I'm sure they are trying to learn. Don't go around saying ignorant things like that when you don't know what you're talking about, you're making the rest of us Americans look bad.
Oh, man! I do this all the time, too.
no i totally know where you're coming from. i have an uncle that's Haitian that i've known for pretty much my whole life and i still need to ask him what he said 3 and 4 times before i understand. more often than not they get offended before you can figure out what they're saying. i say it's not your fault that they didn't learn English better
I can't say you deserve it, because some accents are /very/ hard to understand, despite how well the person learnst o speak English. BUT. You need to /tell/ them that you can't understand them and since saying "what" all the times is cumbersome (which I have to do with my husband's Russian family members ... damn accents) tell them to write it down because you can't understand them. How couldn't you gather that he wasn't joking by a probable saddend look on his face?
I get what you did, it's not being ignorant since you didn't want to keep on asking "What?" every dozen times for a single word. Don't let it get to you since it's not your fault.
Keywords
Bummer. Maybe you should try to understand them better or just be honest and say, "I'm sorry but I just can't understand you; I'm so bad with accents."
i don't care how many times i gotta look stupid repeatedly going "pardon? pardon?" i still gotta know EXACTLY what someone is trying to tell me.